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Alabama students shooting zombie comedy series pilot

Actors portraying zombies are filmed for a scene in Birmingham on Dec. 7. Two telecommunication and film classes from the University of Alabama are working to create a television pilot called “Zom-Com.”(Photo: AP)

TUSCALOOSA – The Super Skate on McFarland Boulevard turned into a dispatch center for a ragtag team of zombie chasers last week as production students from the University of Alabama Telecommunication and Film Department shot a pilot for their television show titled “Zom-Com.”

The show follows a team of people who go on various jobs chasing zombies to collect data about them.

“In the pilot, they botch one of their jobs and bring back incomplete data, so they don’t get paid as much,” Adam Schwartz, assistant professor in the TCF department, said. “To try to make up for that, they accept what is known throughout the zombie-chaser community as a suicide mission. The pilot follows them on that mission.”

Schwartz is teaching the advanced television production class this semester and is making the pilot in collaboration with the students in Matt Payne’s seminar class called “Zombies in Culture.”

Payne is also an assistant professor in the TCF department, and the two wrote the script together over the summer.

The advanced television production class makes a pilot or Web series each semester the class is offered, but this is the first time the students have teamed up with another class to do so.

“We wanted to do something bigger this year, something more ambitious. … We got together to do something for the TV pilot where we combine studies and production,” Schwartz said.

The students are responsible for every aspect of the pilot’s creation, such as casting the show, filming the pilot, scouting locations and editing.

The pilot will showcase the talent of students in each class as well as other students in the TCF department, across campus and members of the community, like makeup artist Brandy Hyche, who provided a workshop on zombie makeup.

“It’s showing what our students are capable of and showing statewide talent and statewide locations,” Payne said. “Bringing that all together to show that significant productions, quality productions can happen not just in the state of Alabama but specifically at the University of Alabama.”

Leigh Rusevlyan, producer of “Zom-Com” and a senior majoring in telecommunication and film, is not in either of the classes but was brought into the project based on her production experience. She said the hardest part has been getting everyone to believe they were actually making a television pilot.

“The students, even the students involved in this class, I think it really took actually being on set for them to realize, ‘Wow, we’re producing something that top competitive film schools are doing. We’re just as competitive, our product is just as professional,’ “ she said.

Even for Rusevlyan, who had a large hand in preproduction, being on set has been the best part of the project. Everything from having the cast — which is made up of Screen Actors Guild actors who auditioned through an open casting call — on set to ordering the craft services has been a high point for her. She said the students involved with the project are also 100 percent on board with it.

“It kind of took until now to reap the benefits of what you’re working on,” she said. “In preproduction, unless you’re the producer like me, you don’t really understand what’s going on until you’re there, and a lot of these students are on hand with the camera works, the lights and setting up things. This is really their time to put all of their hard work into these 10 days.”

The cast and crew filmed at the University of Alabama Arboretum, Super Skate and Carraway Hospital in Birmingham over their eight- to 10-day shooting schedule. Schwartz said he wanted making the pilot to feel more like a job than a class.

“We wanted to see how big we could go with it. We wanted to simulate a real-world production environment as much as we could within the academic environment,” he said. “We tried to pull out all the stops.”